The moon peaked out from behind downy, lavender clouds. Its light crossed over the bridge of Lance’s nose, awakening him. It had been three days since the new nightmare had found him. The spider was back in its web. Spider and web alike were identical to the one that had been there before, and he was beginning to think he was seeing things.

  A quiet voice whispered in his ears, and he could make out some of the words it spoke, though he could not understand them. This was not the language of Shadovane. It was no language he knew. And yet those whispers spoke of strain, of a quiet argument between their originator and some other who remained silent.

  “Tedeltia iyal an! Eya anelfara, decenter omo zentov. Gan amilia speltion aena speltor a goyal ains tilsamav eyal?”

  “Who’s there?” he whispered.

  Silence for several heartbeats.

  “Eyo rocom valadi mi?” came that fraught whisper.

  “I don’t understand.”

  The person to whom the voice belonged, if it could be said to be a person, cleared his throat. He spoke in a guttural voice, heavily accented, but used plain language. Language Lance could understand.

  “Am I to understand…that you can hear me, child?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Were I to tell you, it would fall on deaf ears. Are you the one who tortures me so?”

  “I don’t know what you mean?”

  “You are one of those people…always pulling on my limbs, yanking at my essence, tugging it into shape according to your whims with no regard for the pain it might cause, or whether I wish to come to your aid at all.”

  “I…I don’t…I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Then perhaps you are worthy. One of those rare ones who will listen to the voice behind the cries. Then chew on this for me, and do so diligently. There will be others now, if you care to listen, and those that come will give words for you to puzzle over. Know them. Know me, and perhaps we will abide you for a time. Perhaps you will find friends among us. So, too, you will know my name then. You will not be deaf to it.

  “Know me in my essence.”

  I’ve lost my mind. I’m hearing voices. I’ve completely lost my mind.

  “The sun stands to one side of a mortal. I lay to the other. All things have this in common. The sun shines, and I hide. In plain sight but full of secrets, able to frighten when seen in unexpected places, to divide myself twice or thrice, but always I lay in opposition to the sun. At night, I am at my weakest, and still I hide, for the moon and the stars draw me out, but I mustn’t be seen directly by either.”

  A chuckle slipped out of him. I am truly going mad. “Is this a riddle?”

  “Contemplate my words. Know my name. There will be others.” The whisper faded.

  He climbed out of his bed and dressed himself. As he buttoned his shirt, he glanced at the window. The spider in its web was gone. Was it ever there? Right, then. Just a trick of the eye.

  He ventured into the bowels of the palace, beyond the maze of pipes overhead, across an eroded section of floor where a small pond had formed. Then it was into the furnaces to face the master of the department.

  He kept his expression placid with some effort, but anxiety lay festering under the surface. When he saw the servants at work, the numbness pulled back to reveal another feeling he didn’t quite know what to do with. Envy.

  The Master of the Furnaces was a servant like Mistress Dina. He was a kitune—with deep red skin and conical, tufted ears, and a broad, smashed-looking nose. His head was shaved bald and his beard—a burly frock hanging like a curtain over his jaw—was more silver than umber. Tight wrinkles around his eyes and a body made all of sinew and bone revealed his age.

  “Lance?” he asked, his voice gruff and deep. He shifted a wad of chewing tobacco from his lip to his cheek.

  Lance nodded.

  The Master of the Furnaces held out his hand. “Gregor.”

  Lance took it, and Gregor squeezed with enough force to fold his fingers together.

  “We’ve got two kinds ‘round here. Burners and breezers. Burners ought a thing for fire. Breezers ought a thing for air. We ‘on’t take folks is bad with either. No water. No earth. Got it? They’re useless. And I ‘on’t need staff’s just down here to look pretty.”

  “Understood.” Lance said. “So, what can I do for you?”

  “Tonight you’re gonna shovel coal. Shovel coal, clean pipes. Whatever I tell ya really. I’m not gonna test ya in magic yet. That comes later. Now ya just do the shit work so my regular folk get an easy night for once. They deserve it the work they do here.”

  “Okay.” Lance said.

  “Shovel’s there, coal’s that pile there.” Gregor pointed to a small mountain of glossy, black rocks with a shovel planted in one side. “People come around with a bucket. You fill that bucket. Now get to it.”

  He clapped Lance on the ass. Lance trotted off toward the pile of coal. No sooner than had he picked up the shovel, a pair of kitunes arrived with a bin fit for the launderers.

  They looked expectantly at him. He looked confusedly at them.

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  “Fill…the bucket.” One of them said. She was diminutive, with her hair cut almost to the scalp and a scowl on her face that seemed permanent.

  Rather than risk the wrath of what he thought might be a future coworker, he started shoveling. With minor exception, he didn’t stop until he left for the night. When the pile began to dwindle, a worker struck a button on the wall and a deluge of rocks came shooting out of a door in the ceiling. Lance had been standing directly in the path of the falling stones the first time, and was forced to somersault out of the way. No one thought to warn him. He learned to keep an eye on that button while he worked through the rest of the night.

  He had already sweat through his shirt by the end of the first hour. By the end of the second, he’d abandoned it. Every now and again, someone offered him a flagon of water that he knocked back quickly before returning to his work.

  The workers never seemed to stop moving. As he shoveled and filled buckets and dodged out of the way of falling rocks, no one tried to speak to him if they didn’t have to. No one asked questions or tried to make friends.

  As he worked, he fell into a rhythm. Shovel, fill, dodge. And as the night went on, he found the space he needed to think.

  What if I wasn’t imagining it.

  Shovel, fill, dodge.

  What if that voice belonged to someone. Maybe someone hiding in the shadows. Can the Wraiths speak through them?

  Shovel, fill, dodge.

  What would they want with me? And why give me a riddle, then? Why bother asking me to figure out their names. Most of them would give them freely if I asked.

  Shovel, fill, dodge.

  Of course, I wouldn’t ask. Too much of a coward for that.

  A servant, a Burner or a Breezer, he was not sure which, came by to take the push cart away. Another replaced it with a fresh one.

  He went back to his labor, allowed himself to be swept away by his thoughts again.

  I did see that spider. Almost every night over the last week or so, I’ve seen it. Never mind that means whoever’s been cleaning the barracks isn’t doing a very good job. It was there. I didn’t imagine it. It was right there.

  There was the dream of fire and chaos of a few nights past, too. It had been absent then. Was it trying to shield me? What purpose would that serve?

  And the other dreams. A child alone in the dark and filthy. A food tray materializing now and again. A pile of shit watered down with piss in the corner and rashes breaking over his body. His clothes dirty, his hair caked with oil and grit.

  Eyes flashed across his mind. Eyes, the bridge of a nose. Their owner’s pallor was dark, the nose broad. The eyes were a violent shade of blue, like lightning. They were there and gone in a heartbeat, and an itch formed between his shoulder blades that had nothing to do with the motes of sweat pouring down his back, the sodden shirt clinging to it.

  The night wore on. He lost himself in the rhythm, and the confused tangle of his thoughts leveled out in slow degrees. Everything seemed to swirl around that spider and what it meant. The voice and what it had said. Even when he considered how he had collapsed in Lord Aren’s office—

  “There was a word.” He whispered. “A word I couldn’t understand. Was it a name?”

  He stepped clear of another wave of coal as it cascaded onto the heap, breathed out slow. That language. “It was the same.”

  Master Gregor marched down the channel between monstrous, bronze boxes. The furnaces proper framed him on either side, and fire glow touched his skin at interval as he passed open grates on his way back to the pile of coal.

  “Come down from’ere.” He said. “Want to chat with ya ‘bout some’n.” He spat sleuce on the poured stone floor.

  Lance negotiated himself free of the mound and joined him at floor level. He stuck the shovel in the pile, and Master Gregor guided him through the chamber.

  The furnaces towered over him on either side, cut a sharp corner and continued. Servants worked in teams to blast raw fire into the grates. They used magic to do it, a magic not dissimilar in its composure to the magic the couriers and the Wraiths used to travel through shadow, and yet in their presence he was not afflicted by those too familiar headaches, any waves of fatigue. He felt hale in their presence, even as their magic abounded everywhere around him.

  Master Gregor eyed him. His expression was unreadable.

  “My Burners get most o’ the fun work through ‘em winter months.” He said. “Breezers’re handier in’a summer.”

  “They’re pretty good at this.” Lance said.

  “Better be! S’not like they have a choice.”

  He nodded.

  They climbed up a wire-mesh staircase and onto a catwalk which was positioned high above the furnace heads. Broad, square ducts climbed toward the ceiling to one side of the catwalk, robbing all sight of it from a quarter of the way around down. That exposed quarter was occupied by a poured stone block inset with a bay window, which served as an office for the Master of the Furnace.

  Inside was a long desk peppered with schematics and tools.

  “Sometimes things need reparin’.” He said. “Part o’ the job.”

  He leaned up against the desk. Gestured to a chair near enough by. “Take it.”

  Lance seated himself obediently.

  “We need to talk about yer future here, don’t we. Not a conversation I like havin’. Usually, the young’uns come ‘ere with some baggage. You’an keep it to yerself if you want, but you’ll find out fast ‘em fuck ups down there aren’t big on secrets. We’re a family here. No one’d judge you for being a little screwy. Sky Lord knows you’d fit right in.

  “So are ya in or are ya out?”

  “Sorry what now?”

  He cleared his throat. “Do you want…a job here?” He said, annunciating every word a little more than was necessary. “Lord Aren sent me…” he rummaged through the scattering of papers, plucked one from the heap. “Here it is. Sent a recommendation. Said you’d developed a sensitivity.” He bit down on the word. “And you’d be better off here where it aren’t a lot of shadow walkin’ happening.

  “Now I don’t know ‘bout no sensitivity. Don’t much care for hundred mark words like ‘at. But I do know ‘bout good work ethic and ya got it. Just need’a get the business out the way first, ya know?”

  “I think so.”

  “Great. Good.” He said. “Look, s’not glamorous work, but it can be rewardin’ enough, I guess. You keep yer nose clean and you’an go far here. But we do have rules.”

  “Okay.”

  “First an’ foremost. What happens here stays here. You’an tell yer friends about the work yer doin’ but we got some sensitive business in’is place and s’gotta stay here. That’s gonna be people’s personal business mos’ly, and also how we do magic. Couriers…really any department works wit’ magic’s bound by the same rules. You get caught tryin’ to teach it to people don’t already know, they’ll kill ya. I’m serious, they will. Wraith abduction. Then cold blooded murder. No exceptions. Same’s true of trying to teach someone knows magic magic ‘ey don’ know already know. Trade secrets or somethin’ like ‘at.

  “You agree to that, and I’m willin’ to offer ya a spot on my team. Jus’ need to send Lady Tamalsen a note sayin’ you’re giving the ol’ fuck you to the other places ya staged at.”

  “Lance grimaced. “I don’t know if I’d put it that way. But I like the work here. I’ll take it.”

  “She’ll fight ya.” He said, grinning. “Ya just put up with her shit a little longer, an’ I’ll see ya in a few weeks.”

  “Will it be bad?”

  “Always is. On’y people she thinks so low of as to recommend ‘em to me are kitunes. Jus’ racism. Thinks we’re idiots by nature.

  “But you seem like a stubborn ‘un. She’ll throw a dry run at ya to see if you’d like somethin’ she likes for ya, so ya do what she says. But when time comes, remember I want ya here. Think ya’d get along great with my guys. ‘Specially Duardo. He’s the welcome wagon.”

  He held out his hand to shake. Lance took it, and braced his hand this time.

  Master Gregor smiled. “S’more like it. I’ll see ya.”

  “Thank you for the—“

  “Oh, knock it off with the polities, kid. We ‘on’t do all ‘at formality nonsense here. Jus’ go get ya some sleep.”

  “A-alright.” He climbed out of his chair, passed Master Gregor by. Master Gregor clapped him on his ass on the way out.

  He jumped a foot into the air.

  Master Gregor chuckled. “See ya soon, kid. We’ll start ya off on ‘at logistical learnin’ soon as you’re all clear.”